It's not theft, because you're not depriving the producer of anything. In your gadget example, those gadgets a) cost money to produce and b) selling them is the only way for the company to recoup its costs.
My downloading a copy of a film or whatever doesn't prevent the producer from being able to sell it to other people. The other big difference is that the outcome, for the producer, is the same whether I choose the legal option (don't buy the content, and therefore never see it) or the illegal option (to download it): they get nothing from me, but I also don't cost them anything.
It's for this reason that it appears "neutral": I'm not directly harming them by downloading something I would've otherwise chosen to ignore.
This of course, depends on the idea that you only download things you truly wouldn't buy if you couldn't download them. This isn't always the case, and I guess this is where an individual's sense of ethics comes into it, and why distributing copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission is against the law. On the other hand, quite a few people do buy things they've already acquired by downloading them (myself included), and in many cases had they not being able to try it out "for free" they wouldn't have bought it. There's also the potential for increased word-of-mouth advertising: downloaders telling their friends, who go out and buy the DVD because they actually find it more convenient than downloading, or more people watching it on TV resulting in more advertising revenue. And, since downloading and sharing is an "underground" activity (due to it being illegal), it's nigh impossible to track with any kind of accuracy the nett effect of downloading. So, those in favour of it say it actually helps them sell more stuff, and those opposed say it decreases sales. Both sides are just making stuff up, because nobody actually knows.
Back to your gadget analogy, it would be more accurate to imagine that someone finds a way to duplicate the gadget for a tiny fraction of the RRP. So, he buys one from the store at full price (maybe splitting the costs between a few friends), then he uses his gadget duplicator technology to make limitless additional copies and sells them for a pittance to cover his costs. The manufacturer of the gadget, rather than embrace this new copying technology, continues to make their gadgets the old fashioned way and sell them at the same price. Conscientious consumers naturally choose the cheaper option.
Even worse, the manufacturer may in fact embrace the copying technology in order to lower their costs, but sells their now much cheaper to produce gadgets at the same price as before. Or, they sell them a bit cheaper but with built-in self-destruction devices so you end up needing to buy it several times over if you want to keep using it (that's my analogy for certain DRM schemes).
Now, the manufacturer does still need to defray the R&D costs so they can't sell it as cheaply as the guy who merely copied it, but they need to do it in a way that doesn't make the customer feel like they're being ripped off. That's the tricky bit, and the answer may very well turn out to be that spending millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars making TV shows or movies just isn't a viable use of resources. For example, Prison Break is a reasonably entertaining programme, but is 42 minutes of reasonably entertaining TV really the best use of two million dollars our society can come up with?
See, the value of it is very very low. The asking price is considerably more than that. Therefore, most people wouldn't seriously consider buying it at the asking price, and will simply go without, or wait until it comes onto TV and then record it, or buy it second hand, or whatever.
Digital content provides another option, and one which is quite convenient for many people at that. It's so convenient that many people pay for fast internet connections specifically so they can download things; and many of these people also wear part of the cost of allowing other people to access the content too! Which just goes to show, the content does have some value, it's just much less than the content producers want to charge for it. Also, since the content producers aren't making it available in a convenient and affordable manner, the money is going to those who do: ISP's.
Previously, Big Media have been able to charge whatever they wanted, because it was impractical for anybody else to distribute it. Now, it's cheap and easy to distribute high-quality copies of the content to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Eventually, the content producers will have to accept that they can only charge what the market is willing to pay, but for now they're just throwing a tantrum and calling everyone who doesn't value their content as highly as they do "thieves".
If your editor isn't displaying indentation, you should raise a bug report for it. That's a pretty serious problem and would make editing code much more difficult than it ought to be. HTH.
You did read the "in any sensible practical application" part, right? (Although "any" is a bit strong, as there are some sensible applications where it might be feasible.)
Maybe Google will need to train their pigeons not just to rank webpages, but also to accept millions of OTPs every day so people can securely access their GMail. Then they can outsource them to banks and online retailers!
A 45min program takes roughly a day for me via BT.
Then there is something hideously wrong with your internet connectivity or torrent client configuration. Or, possibly you just get really unlucky with your choice of torrents, but if it consistently takes roughly a day for you via BT then I'd say there's something wrong.
There's a utility called FORFILES.EXE which I think is in the Windows 2000 resource kit. One of the options is to delete files older than a certain number of days.
If you don't have the resource kit around: http://morose.quex.org/Forfiles.exe (but only a fool would download a random exe from slashdot, right?)
-pPath Path where to start searching -mSearch Mask Search files according to <Search Mask> -cCommand Command to execute on each file(s) -d[+|-][DDMMYY|DD] Select files with date >= or <=DDMMYY (UTC) or files having date >= or <= (current date - DD days) -s Recurse directories -v Verbose mode
Seriously, people obviously spent ages developing this game and they want to be paid for it by every user, and not be paid by one person who then shares it with 25,000 people he's never met over bittorrent. Which is exactly what would have happened if they had not had a install limit.
You might almost have a point if cracks for the game weren't already widely available*. That's a large part of what's annoying about these restrictions they place on the product: they don't actually work. All it means is that those who pirate it actually get a better product while those who buy it have to deal with these restrictions, the possibility of mis-detecting their copy as a pirated one (c.f. Windows Genuine Advantage), the copy-protection drivers possibly causing problems, and so on. As for using a crack to get around this, why should a legitimate customer have to get some dodgy third-party software which is explicitly not supported by the game publisher in order to work around defects in the product -- especially deliberately introduced defects?
Also, as others have mentioned, I believe the install limit is now 5, not 25. The limit when it was released was 2. This alone demonstrates that this method is problematic for quite a few of their legitimate customers.
* - I haven't tried any yet so I don't know if they actually work. But they will eventually become available if they're not now.
There is at least one country where the policy is 0.0 blood alcohol level is allowed. Zero Tolerance.
Have you ever heard of a Designated Driver?
Great, so the designated driver fails the breath test because they've got a tiny amount of alcohol on their breath because all their buddies have been drinking. No no, I can already see the answer to that: the DD has to stay in the car away from everyone else so they won't be tainted, just in case they need to suddenly depart in a completely unexpected and unplanned emergency. After all, it's only slightly inconvenient, and might save some lives. Certainly worth pursuing!
The point is that false positives occur with these technical enforcements, and even if it works perfectly there's going to be exceptional cases that weren't considered which cause inconvenience for perfectly legitimate uses.
Too many drunk driving accidents are occurring that prove people CANNOT drive responsibly when drunk. They can only get lucky that nothing bad will happen.
Too many accidents at night prove that people CANNOT drive responsibly at night. They can only get lucky that nothing bad will happen. We must ban all driving at night! Also during rain, because that seems pretty dangerous. Also people with less than 12 months experience driving on public roads seem at pretty high risk, so we'll ban them from public roads until they've driven on public roads for at least a year. It's the only way to be safe. Sorry if that inconveniences anyone, but it's not a problem for me, therefore your opinion doesn't matter.
I do not find it inconvenient to have to put the CD in the drive to play the game of my choice. That makes your opinion unimportant in the grander scheme of things.
Don't have anything to add to this, just thought you might be interested in seeing just how much of a self-righteous jackass you are.
It is inconvenient to have to pay for airline tickets just to travel to another part of the country.
Nobody's complaining that it's inconvenient to have to pay for a game in order to legally own it. A better analogy would be that it's inconvenient to be strip-searched every time you want to travel to another part of the country. After all, some number of people smuggle drugs by jamming them up their arse, and drugs are bad, so it's quite reasonable to strip-search everybody and stick your gloved hand up their arse just in case they happen to be trying to smuggle drugs. Every single time they travel on a plane.
Now Joe, he enjoys being anally violated, so it's not an inconvenience for him. You don't like it? Well, tough, because Joe's okay with it, and your opinion is unimportant in the grander scheme of things. Of course, if this happened, then people would stop smuggling drugs on airplanes, so they'd have to incorporate not just an automatic breath tester in your car, but also an automatic invasive drug search, just in case you're trying to smuggle some drugs to your friends place. Then people would stop driving if they're smuggling drugs, so they'd have to add it to your bicycle as well. Then have cops to search you when you're walking down the street, just in case.
Is it that hard to understand that there's different people in the world who are okay with different levels of inconvenience? Having to enter a serial number when I install a game doesn't bother me too much -- I don't like it, and I think it's a pointless inconvenience, but I'm okay with it. Having to enter the serial number every single time I start the game would bother me, and I'd try to find a crack for it, or failing that, not bother with it. For some, having to have a CD in the drive to play the game is too much inconvenience, so they find a workaround.
Having to have the CD in your drive isn't an inconvenience to you. Fine. Will it be inconvenient to have to be connected to the internet every single time you want to play the game, because it verifies you're authorised to play the game each time you run it? Will it be inconvenient that you have to wait for it to download 2 gigs of data every time you play the game, because it removes itself from your drive after you've finished playing it? Will it be inconvenient when their auth servers are down so you can't play the game when you want, or will you be fine with that because it "helps stop piracy"? Will you still think it's fine and dandy when you're only able to play the game on overpriced "certified" PCs which are tightly controlled and prevent you from running any software not signed by one of the manufactures which has purchased, or will you be happy because consoles are already like that?
Just because you're happy with the current measures doesn't mean that anyone who isn't happy doesn't matter. People need to voice their opinions on these things, or else the manufacturers will have no idea when they've gone too far. Every anti-piracy measure is going to piss off some number of legitimate customers, and they need to be able to weigh that against the benefit it provides to them in terms of increased sales. Furthermore, the fact that people who legitimately buy games do feel inconvenienced enough by the copy protection mechanisms that they go out looking for cracks should be a concern to publishers. These people may have otherwise never considered pirating a game, but since they have to go looking for cracks for it anyway, they might end up discovering that it's actually easier to pirate it in the first place rather than go to the store and buy it.
Re:Why no mention?
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Don't you think that the game companies themselves feel exactly the way you do, in that they are "really fed up with the pirates consistently getting the better product than the legit customers" as well? They are, and this is why they are making it increasingly difficult to pirate their games.
They're fed up with pirates consistently getting a better product, so they try to make their product even worse for legitimate customers?
Don't even go there trying to attack cars that attempt to determine if you are too drunk to drive.
Why not? Would it make it harder for you to feel self-righteous if people could find a flaw in this? But it's so easy to do! Firstly, "too drunk to drive" varies from person to person. Secondly, one of the problems with technical enforcement is that it fails to take into account exceptional circumstances.
Say you go camping with some friends, and you all sit around the camp fire enjoying a few drinks before calling it a night... meanwhile, some other campers nearby got a bit lazy and managed to set the damned forest on fire. By the time you realise, your only hope for escape is by car. Unfortunately, its breath analyser determines that you're all 0.0001 over its prescribed limit, and it refuses to start. Everyone burns to death because of an arbitrary technical restriction. Now, a cop with a breathalyser is applying the same arbitrary blood alcohol limit that a machine would be, regardless of how much it actually impairs a specific individual's driving -- but a cop has the ability to say, well, you were trying to escape certain death, so I'm not going to arrest you because you're slightly over the limit. Furthermore, it's unlikely a cop would be there to delay your departure in the first place; and even if there did happen to be a cop there, he probably wouldn't get in your way if you were fleeing a fire. Technical enforcement gives you no choice except to burn to death.
And that's assuming that the breath analyser actually works exactly according to specifications and is 100% accurate 100% of the time. Most software has bugs or simply limitations. You can install BioShock over and over again -- so long as you're able to complete a clean uninstall on your system and it's able to tell the tracking server that you've uninstalled a copy. If that fails, you've just lost a slot, and have to jump through even more hoops in order to use the product in ways you're completely entitled to use it.
This why people get upset at heavy-handed copy protection. Yes, if everything works fine there's no problem, and this is the case for probably 90% of the people. But if you do have exceptional circumstances, or if something goes wrong (e.g. it mistakenly identifies your copy as being pirated and locks you out of it), then it's really fucking annoying. And, unlike you, a lot of people are not willing to put up with annoyances like this for a product they've paid good money to use, just like most people aren't willing to be burnt alive because the breathalyser works well enough in 90% of cases.
And you are thankful for cracks? So, although you condemn piracy, you encourage (and endorse) it? I'm sorry. In the end, you prove yourself to be a hypocrite.
I don't see how that's hypocritical. He's thankful for cracks because they let him get around the intentional crippling of software by its producers. Which is to say, they add value to something he's paid for and making it easier for him to enjoy. The intentions and motivations of the producers of the game really don't matter. I completely fail to see how it's hypocritical to be against piracy, but also to be against copy protection -- especially copy protection which forces you to jump through hoops in order to exercise your rights with something you've legitimately purchased.
If you were about to die in a forest fire because your stupid car thought you were too drunk to use it safely, you'd be thankful if someone happened to kno
Will you still be merely flattered when that interested person becomes very, very interested? So interested that they decide they really want to be you? So interested that they seem to be everywhere you go, because they never want to miss out on anything that's happening in your life?
Not saying that P2P phone networks will suddenly turn everyone into psychotic stalkers or make it easier to do this, but I do find it interesting how many people seem to be dismissing the idea of other people listening to their calls / reading their email etc. out of hand because they, themselves, would find it boring. Sure, it'd be uninteresting to normal people... but not everybody's "normal.".
Perhaps if I embolden the point to which the GP was responding it will make it clearer:
(all of which, the traffic goes through a central server, I might add)
Also, there's a difference between having one's data routed through various ISP's hardware, compared to having it routed through your neighbour's equipment. People tend to have slightly more trust in the administrators of actual real networks than they do in Joe Random. At the very least, the network admins tend to have better things to do with their time than spy on a random person's traffic to see if it's interesting. Joe R on the other hand...
"Tyres" is the plural of "tyre", with "a tyre" being those rubbery things you put over wheels to stop them from digging up the road. Also spelt* "tire". Not sure about chalking the tyres, but I guess that could be used to mark cars which are already there, then when you come back later you can see if it's the same car.
Google makes money with their farm, which makes it far less impressive to me. It takes some serious money and engineering to keep the various root server clusters up 24/7, and it's done basically by a volunteer community.
They also do have a pretty remarkable amount of load, given how rarely they "ought" to be used.
The H server averaged 5 megabytes/sec of inbound traffic over the last month. Given how small DNS queries are, that's an awful lot of queries! Over 7,000 packets per second, every second.
Possibly simply exposing a large number of people to the concept is the most significant part though.
Maybe in 10 or 20 years time when virtually all software is Free and package management systems like apt are the way the vast majority get their software, we'll look back and say that Firefox was the start of the trend to this way of working with computers. Or perhaps OpenOffice.org will be. Or perhaps Linux, or something else.
In this sense, it doesn't really matter who was responsible for creating the paradigm. What's important is who or what was responsible for causing it to make a real, significant impact in people's lives. That's yet to happen, as the majority of people still download binary blobs from random websites, and consider this the normal way of obtaining software.
Pyramid-shaped tombs were almost certainly constructed before The Pyramids, but they're not notable in any way: it wasn't until they were built on such a massive scale that they became wondrous. Likewise, creating a new paradigm for software development and community isn't notable in itself, until it becomes massively widespread. And then, it's going to be whoever made it massive that gets the attention.
Probably because claims to the effect of "all blank are filthy scammers and spammers" are generally considered to be flamebait? Add to that the whole notion of "our cyberspace" and a completely unrealistic proposal (just how do you prevent an entire country from connecting to the internet, anyway?). Yeah, it's flamebait.
I doubt it. I mean, they were in a motorcade, flying Canadian flags even though the Canadian prime minister hadn't actually arrived in the country yet. I think the reason they got through was because it "looked" official enough, and whatever actually checks they have in place were obviously flawed.
One would think that the movement of each motorcade would be tracked, and all security checkpoints would be aware of who is approaching them. It actually sounds like they merely have instructions to stop anyone who doesn't look like part of an official party representing a country.
Extreme security measures and their effectiveness are very much a current topic (especially at airports). This prank shows that often the "intense security measures" don't do squat or can be trivially bypassed. They actually made today a public holiday in Sydney, because the lockdown is expected to be so disruptive to transport that they decided it would be too difficult for a lot of people to get to and from work. So yes, the security for this event is supposed to be pretty tight, to the extent that they're shutting down the city for it. Yet apparently, if you stick a few flags on your car you can drive right on through.
I was surprised to see this on/. -- but there's plenty of other crap articles that make it on here, and this is one of the better ones, IMHO.
There's more to it than that: it's about ISPs having the ability to (and possibly, even becoming required to) monitor every user's traffic and take action against that which doesn't meet whatever criteria they choose to use.
Even though the current use is merely to reduce the impact of warez traffic on their networks, once this is in place and commonly accepted it's a very small road from here to a tiered internet, or even to having everything you do being subject to scrutiny by automated devices that decide if you're using the internet in a "normal" way or not.
Pretty soon after that, attempts to evade such monitoring (by using encrypted connections / VPNs) will become "suspicious by default". I mean, if you're trying to prevent "unapproved" use of the internet, it's much easier to take a "default deny" approach and then explicitly allow particular approved behaviour. Seems like a logical progression to me, actually, and it's how things generally work already: most corporate firewalls block all traffic except that which is explicitly permitted.
If the comments regarding "common carrier" status of ISPs by other posters are correct, then it becomes even more inevitable: once it's demonstrated ISPs have the ability to filter their customers traffic like this, then they potentially become liable for any illegal activity carried out using their service; therefore, they can't afford NOT to block everything except that which they know is legal.
I think they just managed to copy some tooltips or something along with the word.
I imagine "YouTube" was meant to be a link with a title of "Latest News about YouTube", and "Mozilla" was meant to be linked with a title of "Latest News about Mozilla Foundation".
Just how ScuttleMonkey managed to post it like that is beyond me though. (Actually, I can guess: he didn't actually read it.)
PS - what is "cruft"? Is that American for "crud" or "crap" or "stuff"?
All of the above, pretty much.
From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:
cruft/kruhft/ [very common; back-formation from {crufty}]
n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the
TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only
produces more.
n. The results of shoddy construction.
vt. [from
`hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something
normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}).
n.
Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code.
[University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese;
that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers".
It's to maximise sales at release, and immediately after -- when the hype is at its peak. Apparently there's lots of people who can't control their desire to play a game immediately at release, and will buy it if they can't pirate it.
In almost all cases, the copy protection is only intended to last a few weeks through the initial sales. Anyone that pirates it after that was never going to buy it anyway.
He states that because of the protection annoyance he will not buy the game but pirate it instead. How is this different than someone pirating a game because it costs money?
Did you actually read what you wrote? They're different because they're different things!
He stated that the reason he will not buy the game is due to the copy protection. That is, the copy protection itself is what is ensuring he will NOT buy the game. That's very different to "I won't buy the game because it costs money". That says, "I would have (or, I may have) bought the game if it didn't have this copy protection on it."
So they're different because, even though both attitudes result in a lost sale, they reflect different reasons for losing the sale. Selling the game at half the normal price likely would increase sales from some of the people who don't buy it due to the cost, but will make no difference to someone who's not buying it because of the additional, unwanted payload.
Using these copy protection mechanisms actually costs publishers money (licensing, implementation, and support costs) so it's very important they can gauge not only how many extra sales it makes them (from people who would've pirated it if it was easier to do so), but how many sales these schemes cost them. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to spend money implementing features that reduce your sales. Like many things, it's a balancing act, and at the moment it seems clear to come out in favour of copy protection. But it's also clear that there are people who have an issue with more invasive DRM methods, and that's something that needs to be factored in to the business decision.
The mere fact that any clown feels that he has the right to decide if he will buy or pirate a game is ridiculous.
Fair point, though it's not necessarily that simple. I'm somewhat interested in this game, but I don't want DRM services running on my machine, so more than likely what's going to happen is that I'll pirate it (when a crack becomes available) and try it out. If it turns out like all the other overyhyped FPS games, then I'll uninstall it and not buy it (much the same as would happen if I tried the demo, except without the DRM). If I like it, I'll buy it but not install it from this "legitimate" source. Thus, the publisher will sell a copy, and I'll get to enjoy the game sans DRM.
Without piracy as an option -- I'd just skip it. It's just a game, after all; though it might be a very good game.
So basically, it can be seen as executing my right to ignore the game completely -- not buy it, not even try the demo -- but with at least the potential for a sale. I suspect this will grate with your moral compass: they certainly have the right to dictate the exact terms by which I may consume their media, and my only right is to choose either to accept those terms or not consume the media at all. My moral compass is okay with it, because I know that a) I won't knowingly install mysterious DRM stuff on my computer, which rules out the demo version and b) I won't drop $80 on a game I've never played.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not theft, because you're not depriving the producer of anything. In your gadget example, those gadgets a) cost money to produce and b) selling them is the only way for the company to recoup its costs.
My downloading a copy of a film or whatever doesn't prevent the producer from being able to sell it to other people. The other big difference is that the outcome, for the producer, is the same whether I choose the legal option (don't buy the content, and therefore never see it) or the illegal option (to download it): they get nothing from me, but I also don't cost them anything.
It's for this reason that it appears "neutral": I'm not directly harming them by downloading something I would've otherwise chosen to ignore.
This of course, depends on the idea that you only download things you truly wouldn't buy if you couldn't download them. This isn't always the case, and I guess this is where an individual's sense of ethics comes into it, and why distributing copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission is against the law. On the other hand, quite a few people do buy things they've already acquired by downloading them (myself included), and in many cases had they not being able to try it out "for free" they wouldn't have bought it. There's also the potential for increased word-of-mouth advertising: downloaders telling their friends, who go out and buy the DVD because they actually find it more convenient than downloading, or more people watching it on TV resulting in more advertising revenue. And, since downloading and sharing is an "underground" activity (due to it being illegal), it's nigh impossible to track with any kind of accuracy the nett effect of downloading. So, those in favour of it say it actually helps them sell more stuff, and those opposed say it decreases sales. Both sides are just making stuff up, because nobody actually knows.
Back to your gadget analogy, it would be more accurate to imagine that someone finds a way to duplicate the gadget for a tiny fraction of the RRP. So, he buys one from the store at full price (maybe splitting the costs between a few friends), then he uses his gadget duplicator technology to make limitless additional copies and sells them for a pittance to cover his costs. The manufacturer of the gadget, rather than embrace this new copying technology, continues to make their gadgets the old fashioned way and sell them at the same price. Conscientious consumers naturally choose the cheaper option.
Even worse, the manufacturer may in fact embrace the copying technology in order to lower their costs, but sells their now much cheaper to produce gadgets at the same price as before. Or, they sell them a bit cheaper but with built-in self-destruction devices so you end up needing to buy it several times over if you want to keep using it (that's my analogy for certain DRM schemes).
Now, the manufacturer does still need to defray the R&D costs so they can't sell it as cheaply as the guy who merely copied it, but they need to do it in a way that doesn't make the customer feel like they're being ripped off. That's the tricky bit, and the answer may very well turn out to be that spending millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars making TV shows or movies just isn't a viable use of resources. For example, Prison Break is a reasonably entertaining programme, but is 42 minutes of reasonably entertaining TV really the best use of two million dollars our society can come up with?
Because they can. Seriously.
See, the value of it is very very low. The asking price is considerably more than that. Therefore, most people wouldn't seriously consider buying it at the asking price, and will simply go without, or wait until it comes onto TV and then record it, or buy it second hand, or whatever.
Digital content provides another option, and one which is quite convenient for many people at that. It's so convenient that many people pay for fast internet connections specifically so they can download things; and many of these people also wear part of the cost of allowing other people to access the content too! Which just goes to show, the content does have some value, it's just much less than the content producers want to charge for it. Also, since the content producers aren't making it available in a convenient and affordable manner, the money is going to those who do: ISP's.
Previously, Big Media have been able to charge whatever they wanted, because it was impractical for anybody else to distribute it. Now, it's cheap and easy to distribute high-quality copies of the content to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Eventually, the content producers will have to accept that they can only charge what the market is willing to pay, but for now they're just throwing a tantrum and calling everyone who doesn't value their content as highly as they do "thieves".
Strange definition of free you've got there. ;)
If your editor isn't displaying indentation, you should raise a bug report for it. That's a pretty serious problem and would make editing code much more difficult than it ought to be. HTH.
You did read the "in any sensible practical application" part, right? (Although "any" is a bit strong, as there are some sensible applications where it might be feasible.)
Maybe Google will need to train their pigeons not just to rank webpages, but also to accept millions of OTPs every day so people can securely access their GMail. Then they can outsource them to banks and online retailers!
Then there is something hideously wrong with your internet connectivity or torrent client configuration. Or, possibly you just get really unlucky with your choice of torrents, but if it consistently takes roughly a day for you via BT then I'd say there's something wrong.
That said, use what works for you.
There's a utility called FORFILES.EXE which I think is in the Windows 2000 resource kit. One of the options is to delete files older than a certain number of days.
If you don't have the resource kit around: http://morose.quex.org/Forfiles.exe (but only a fool would download a random exe from slashdot, right?)
This command should do the trick:
You might almost have a point if cracks for the game weren't already widely available*. That's a large part of what's annoying about these restrictions they place on the product: they don't actually work. All it means is that those who pirate it actually get a better product while those who buy it have to deal with these restrictions, the possibility of mis-detecting their copy as a pirated one (c.f. Windows Genuine Advantage), the copy-protection drivers possibly causing problems, and so on. As for using a crack to get around this, why should a legitimate customer have to get some dodgy third-party software which is explicitly not supported by the game publisher in order to work around defects in the product -- especially deliberately introduced defects?
Also, as others have mentioned, I believe the install limit is now 5, not 25. The limit when it was released was 2. This alone demonstrates that this method is problematic for quite a few of their legitimate customers.
* - I haven't tried any yet so I don't know if they actually work. But they will eventually become available if they're not now.
Have you ever heard of a Designated Driver?
Great, so the designated driver fails the breath test because they've got a tiny amount of alcohol on their breath because all their buddies have been drinking. No no, I can already see the answer to that: the DD has to stay in the car away from everyone else so they won't be tainted, just in case they need to suddenly depart in a completely unexpected and unplanned emergency. After all, it's only slightly inconvenient, and might save some lives. Certainly worth pursuing!
The point is that false positives occur with these technical enforcements, and even if it works perfectly there's going to be exceptional cases that weren't considered which cause inconvenience for perfectly legitimate uses.
Too many drunk driving accidents are occurring that prove people CANNOT drive responsibly when drunk. They can only get lucky that nothing bad will happen.Too many accidents at night prove that people CANNOT drive responsibly at night. They can only get lucky that nothing bad will happen. We must ban all driving at night! Also during rain, because that seems pretty dangerous. Also people with less than 12 months experience driving on public roads seem at pretty high risk, so we'll ban them from public roads until they've driven on public roads for at least a year. It's the only way to be safe. Sorry if that inconveniences anyone, but it's not a problem for me, therefore your opinion doesn't matter.
Don't have anything to add to this, just thought you might be interested in seeing just how much of a self-righteous jackass you are.
It is inconvenient to have to pay for airline tickets just to travel to another part of the country.Nobody's complaining that it's inconvenient to have to pay for a game in order to legally own it. A better analogy would be that it's inconvenient to be strip-searched every time you want to travel to another part of the country. After all, some number of people smuggle drugs by jamming them up their arse, and drugs are bad, so it's quite reasonable to strip-search everybody and stick your gloved hand up their arse just in case they happen to be trying to smuggle drugs. Every single time they travel on a plane.
Now Joe, he enjoys being anally violated, so it's not an inconvenience for him. You don't like it? Well, tough, because Joe's okay with it, and your opinion is unimportant in the grander scheme of things. Of course, if this happened, then people would stop smuggling drugs on airplanes, so they'd have to incorporate not just an automatic breath tester in your car, but also an automatic invasive drug search, just in case you're trying to smuggle some drugs to your friends place. Then people would stop driving if they're smuggling drugs, so they'd have to add it to your bicycle as well. Then have cops to search you when you're walking down the street, just in case.
Is it that hard to understand that there's different people in the world who are okay with different levels of inconvenience? Having to enter a serial number when I install a game doesn't bother me too much -- I don't like it, and I think it's a pointless inconvenience, but I'm okay with it. Having to enter the serial number every single time I start the game would bother me, and I'd try to find a crack for it, or failing that, not bother with it. For some, having to have a CD in the drive to play the game is too much inconvenience, so they find a workaround.
Having to have the CD in your drive isn't an inconvenience to you. Fine. Will it be inconvenient to have to be connected to the internet every single time you want to play the game, because it verifies you're authorised to play the game each time you run it? Will it be inconvenient that you have to wait for it to download 2 gigs of data every time you play the game, because it removes itself from your drive after you've finished playing it? Will it be inconvenient when their auth servers are down so you can't play the game when you want, or will you be fine with that because it "helps stop piracy"? Will you still think it's fine and dandy when you're only able to play the game on overpriced "certified" PCs which are tightly controlled and prevent you from running any software not signed by one of the manufactures which has purchased, or will you be happy because consoles are already like that?
Just because you're happy with the current measures doesn't mean that anyone who isn't happy doesn't matter. People need to voice their opinions on these things, or else the manufacturers will have no idea when they've gone too far. Every anti-piracy measure is going to piss off some number of legitimate customers, and they need to be able to weigh that against the benefit it provides to them in terms of increased sales. Furthermore, the fact that people who legitimately buy games do feel inconvenienced enough by the copy protection mechanisms that they go out looking for cracks should be a concern to publishers. These people may have otherwise never considered pirating a game, but since they have to go looking for cracks for it anyway, they might end up discovering that it's actually easier to pirate it in the first place rather than go to the store and buy it.
Don't you think that the game companies themselves feel exactly the way you do, in that they are "really fed up with the pirates consistently getting the better product than the legit customers" as well? They are, and this is why they are making it increasingly difficult to pirate their games.
They're fed up with pirates consistently getting a better product, so they try to make their product even worse for legitimate customers?
Don't even go there trying to attack cars that attempt to determine if you are too drunk to drive.
Why not? Would it make it harder for you to feel self-righteous if people could find a flaw in this? But it's so easy to do! Firstly, "too drunk to drive" varies from person to person. Secondly, one of the problems with technical enforcement is that it fails to take into account exceptional circumstances.
Say you go camping with some friends, and you all sit around the camp fire enjoying a few drinks before calling it a night... meanwhile, some other campers nearby got a bit lazy and managed to set the damned forest on fire. By the time you realise, your only hope for escape is by car. Unfortunately, its breath analyser determines that you're all 0.0001 over its prescribed limit, and it refuses to start. Everyone burns to death because of an arbitrary technical restriction. Now, a cop with a breathalyser is applying the same arbitrary blood alcohol limit that a machine would be, regardless of how much it actually impairs a specific individual's driving -- but a cop has the ability to say, well, you were trying to escape certain death, so I'm not going to arrest you because you're slightly over the limit. Furthermore, it's unlikely a cop would be there to delay your departure in the first place; and even if there did happen to be a cop there, he probably wouldn't get in your way if you were fleeing a fire. Technical enforcement gives you no choice except to burn to death.
And that's assuming that the breath analyser actually works exactly according to specifications and is 100% accurate 100% of the time. Most software has bugs or simply limitations. You can install BioShock over and over again -- so long as you're able to complete a clean uninstall on your system and it's able to tell the tracking server that you've uninstalled a copy. If that fails, you've just lost a slot, and have to jump through even more hoops in order to use the product in ways you're completely entitled to use it.
This why people get upset at heavy-handed copy protection. Yes, if everything works fine there's no problem, and this is the case for probably 90% of the people. But if you do have exceptional circumstances, or if something goes wrong (e.g. it mistakenly identifies your copy as being pirated and locks you out of it), then it's really fucking annoying. And, unlike you, a lot of people are not willing to put up with annoyances like this for a product they've paid good money to use, just like most people aren't willing to be burnt alive because the breathalyser works well enough in 90% of cases.
And you are thankful for cracks? So, although you condemn piracy, you encourage (and endorse) it? I'm sorry. In the end, you prove yourself to be a hypocrite.
I don't see how that's hypocritical. He's thankful for cracks because they let him get around the intentional crippling of software by its producers. Which is to say, they add value to something he's paid for and making it easier for him to enjoy. The intentions and motivations of the producers of the game really don't matter. I completely fail to see how it's hypocritical to be against piracy, but also to be against copy protection -- especially copy protection which forces you to jump through hoops in order to exercise your rights with something you've legitimately purchased.
If you were about to die in a forest fire because your stupid car thought you were too drunk to use it safely, you'd be thankful if someone happened to kno
Will you still be merely flattered when that interested person becomes very, very interested? So interested that they decide they really want to be you? So interested that they seem to be everywhere you go, because they never want to miss out on anything that's happening in your life?
Not saying that P2P phone networks will suddenly turn everyone into psychotic stalkers or make it easier to do this, but I do find it interesting how many people seem to be dismissing the idea of other people listening to their calls / reading their email etc. out of hand because they, themselves, would find it boring. Sure, it'd be uninteresting to normal people... but not everybody's "normal.".
Perhaps if I embolden the point to which the GP was responding it will make it clearer:
(all of which, the traffic goes through a central server, I might add)Also, there's a difference between having one's data routed through various ISP's hardware, compared to having it routed through your neighbour's equipment. People tend to have slightly more trust in the administrators of actual real networks than they do in Joe Random. At the very least, the network admins tend to have better things to do with their time than spy on a random person's traffic to see if it's interesting. Joe R on the other hand...
"Tyres" is the plural of "tyre", with "a tyre" being those rubbery things you put over wheels to stop them from digging up the road. Also spelt* "tire". Not sure about chalking the tyres, but I guess that could be used to mark cars which are already there, then when you come back later you can see if it's the same car.
* - Spelt can also be spelt as spelled.
Google makes money with their farm, which makes it far less impressive to me. It takes some serious money and engineering to keep the various root server clusters up 24/7, and it's done basically by a volunteer community.
They also do have a pretty remarkable amount of load, given how rarely they "ought" to be used.
http://h.root-servers.org/128.63.2.53_2.html
The H server averaged 5 megabytes/sec of inbound traffic over the last month. Given how small DNS queries are, that's an awful lot of queries! Over 7,000 packets per second, every second.
Possibly simply exposing a large number of people to the concept is the most significant part though.
Maybe in 10 or 20 years time when virtually all software is Free and package management systems like apt are the way the vast majority get their software, we'll look back and say that Firefox was the start of the trend to this way of working with computers. Or perhaps OpenOffice.org will be. Or perhaps Linux, or something else.
In this sense, it doesn't really matter who was responsible for creating the paradigm. What's important is who or what was responsible for causing it to make a real, significant impact in people's lives. That's yet to happen, as the majority of people still download binary blobs from random websites, and consider this the normal way of obtaining software.
Pyramid-shaped tombs were almost certainly constructed before The Pyramids, but they're not notable in any way: it wasn't until they were built on such a massive scale that they became wondrous. Likewise, creating a new paradigm for software development and community isn't notable in itself, until it becomes massively widespread. And then, it's going to be whoever made it massive that gets the attention.
It's not even "Team Fury", it's "Team Furry". Trying to find something else to think about now...
Probably because claims to the effect of "all blank are filthy scammers and spammers" are generally considered to be flamebait? Add to that the whole notion of "our cyberspace" and a completely unrealistic proposal (just how do you prevent an entire country from connecting to the internet, anyway?). Yeah, it's flamebait.
I doubt it. I mean, they were in a motorcade, flying Canadian flags even though the Canadian prime minister hadn't actually arrived in the country yet. I think the reason they got through was because it "looked" official enough, and whatever actually checks they have in place were obviously flawed.
One would think that the movement of each motorcade would be tracked, and all security checkpoints would be aware of who is approaching them. It actually sounds like they merely have instructions to stop anyone who doesn't look like part of an official party representing a country.
Extreme security measures and their effectiveness are very much a current topic (especially at airports). This prank shows that often the "intense security measures" don't do squat or can be trivially bypassed. They actually made today a public holiday in Sydney, because the lockdown is expected to be so disruptive to transport that they decided it would be too difficult for a lot of people to get to and from work. So yes, the security for this event is supposed to be pretty tight, to the extent that they're shutting down the city for it. Yet apparently, if you stick a few flags on your car you can drive right on through.
I was surprised to see this on /. -- but there's plenty of other crap articles that make it on here, and this is one of the better ones, IMHO.
There's more to it than that: it's about ISPs having the ability to (and possibly, even becoming required to) monitor every user's traffic and take action against that which doesn't meet whatever criteria they choose to use.
Even though the current use is merely to reduce the impact of warez traffic on their networks, once this is in place and commonly accepted it's a very small road from here to a tiered internet, or even to having everything you do being subject to scrutiny by automated devices that decide if you're using the internet in a "normal" way or not.
Pretty soon after that, attempts to evade such monitoring (by using encrypted connections / VPNs) will become "suspicious by default". I mean, if you're trying to prevent "unapproved" use of the internet, it's much easier to take a "default deny" approach and then explicitly allow particular approved behaviour. Seems like a logical progression to me, actually, and it's how things generally work already: most corporate firewalls block all traffic except that which is explicitly permitted.
If the comments regarding "common carrier" status of ISPs by other posters are correct, then it becomes even more inevitable: once it's demonstrated ISPs have the ability to filter their customers traffic like this, then they potentially become liable for any illegal activity carried out using their service; therefore, they can't afford NOT to block everything except that which they know is legal.
I think they just managed to copy some tooltips or something along with the word.
I imagine "YouTube" was meant to be a link with a title of "Latest News about YouTube", and "Mozilla" was meant to be linked with a title of "Latest News about Mozilla Foundation".
Just how ScuttleMonkey managed to post it like that is beyond me though. (Actually, I can guess: he didn't actually read it.)
All of the above, pretty much.
From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]: cruftIt's to maximise sales at release, and immediately after -- when the hype is at its peak. Apparently there's lots of people who can't control their desire to play a game immediately at release, and will buy it if they can't pirate it.
In almost all cases, the copy protection is only intended to last a few weeks through the initial sales. Anyone that pirates it after that was never going to buy it anyway.
Did you actually read what you wrote? They're different because they're different things!
He stated that the reason he will not buy the game is due to the copy protection. That is, the copy protection itself is what is ensuring he will NOT buy the game. That's very different to "I won't buy the game because it costs money". That says, "I would have (or, I may have) bought the game if it didn't have this copy protection on it."
So they're different because, even though both attitudes result in a lost sale, they reflect different reasons for losing the sale. Selling the game at half the normal price likely would increase sales from some of the people who don't buy it due to the cost, but will make no difference to someone who's not buying it because of the additional, unwanted payload.
Using these copy protection mechanisms actually costs publishers money (licensing, implementation, and support costs) so it's very important they can gauge not only how many extra sales it makes them (from people who would've pirated it if it was easier to do so), but how many sales these schemes cost them. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to spend money implementing features that reduce your sales. Like many things, it's a balancing act, and at the moment it seems clear to come out in favour of copy protection. But it's also clear that there are people who have an issue with more invasive DRM methods, and that's something that needs to be factored in to the business decision.
The mere fact that any clown feels that he has the right to decide if he will buy or pirate a game is ridiculous.Fair point, though it's not necessarily that simple. I'm somewhat interested in this game, but I don't want DRM services running on my machine, so more than likely what's going to happen is that I'll pirate it (when a crack becomes available) and try it out. If it turns out like all the other overyhyped FPS games, then I'll uninstall it and not buy it (much the same as would happen if I tried the demo, except without the DRM). If I like it, I'll buy it but not install it from this "legitimate" source. Thus, the publisher will sell a copy, and I'll get to enjoy the game sans DRM.
Without piracy as an option -- I'd just skip it. It's just a game, after all; though it might be a very good game.
So basically, it can be seen as executing my right to ignore the game completely -- not buy it, not even try the demo -- but with at least the potential for a sale. I suspect this will grate with your moral compass: they certainly have the right to dictate the exact terms by which I may consume their media, and my only right is to choose either to accept those terms or not consume the media at all. My moral compass is okay with it, because I know that a) I won't knowingly install mysterious DRM stuff on my computer, which rules out the demo version and b) I won't drop $80 on a game I've never played.